Sunday, March 29, 2009

Cleaning up Gotham City

A few months back, I had the pleasure of doing an illustration for the good folks at Nickelodeon magazine. The request was to create an old-style comic book cover for the character "BatButler" for a made up line of "Low Value" comics.

I had a blast working on this, not only designing BB's look, but the book's title and LV comics logos too! You can see mine, alongside several other very cool covers from the Low Value line of comics in Nick's latest issue (marked April 09) on stands now. (the magazine is really just chock full of cool illustrations) Thanks to Gordon Whiteside for the assignment!

Below are some process steps towards the finished piece:First I submitted a few thumbnail roughs on possible layout and "gag" ideas. Like the one they selected shown here:

I also included a rough sketch of a logo Idea I had for the book, drawing from the opening title sequence from the 60's Batman tv show;

Once the initial thumbnail was approved, I moved into tighter pencils including a rough-in of title and various logo elements:

I then moved into the inking, scanning and coloring process with the character and at the same time created the logo in illustrator. Then I pulled them all together, adding some dot patterns and "aging" to the faux comic cover and ended up with the final image shown here: